CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
JACK
KEROUAC'S
)\
INNOCENT VISION
A thesis submitted in partial
satisfaction of the requirements
for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in
English
by
Daniel l\1ark Scott
---
June, 19'78
The thesis of Daniel Mark Scott is approved:
California State
June~
University~
1978 ·
No:cthridge
1
In a significant number of his novels, Jack Kerouac
searches for the simplicity, freedom, and idealism of a.
truly innocent life.
Robert A. Hipkiss in Jack Kerouac,
Prophet Of The New Romanticism refers to Kerouac's work
(the novels about Lowell, Massachusetts in particular):
"They celebrate a child's vision of innocence that cannot
come again but which Kerouac desperately holds onto as the
only true vision of purity and goodness in a corrupt
world."
1
That statement not only desc-ribes the Lowell
novels but serves to illuminate and explain almost every
no,jel that Kerouac wrote.
Kerouac' s novels chart the
voyage of the child/innocent as he searches for spiritual
inspiration and transcendence in America.
in The Dharma. Burris:
all the same."
11
As Kerouac says
To the children and the innocent it's
2
Jack Kerouac treasured simplicity and exhibited a
lasting innocent vision of the world.
In Visions Of Cody,
Jack Duluoz states:
"I'm writing this book because we're all
going to die--In the loneliness of my
life, my father dead, my brother dead,
my mother faraway, my sister and my wife
faraway, nothing here but my own tragic
hands that once were guarded by a world,
a sweet attention, that now are left to
guide and disappear their own way into
the common dark of all our death,
sleeping in me ra'"' bed, alone and stupid:
with just this one pride and consolation:
my heart broke in the general despair,
and opened up inwards to the Lord, I
made a supplication in this dream"
(yyc, 36 s > .
2
In this passage, Kerouac expresses his vulnerability and
anguish, but beyond that, there lies a prevailing hope, a
belief in some eternal principle that will see him through.
Since the majority of Kerouac's work is autobiographical, a
large number of actual people reappear throughout his novels
under different names.
They include Allen Ginsberg, t<Villiam
Burroughs, Gary Snyder, his dear friend, Neal Cassady, along
with members of his family and other major figures in his
life.
Kerouac's ever present hope is his reaction to his
vision of being a child forced to deal with an uncaring and
incomprehensible world.
Kerouac sought to prolong a belief in goodness and
innocence beyond childhood.
There was a coherence to his
youth that he would never recover and always sought.
The
break came when his family left his home town of Lowetl,
Massachusetts, and moved to New Haven and Ozone Park.
He
later expressed his feelings of dislocation in Dr. Sax:
"I judged I was being torn from my mother's womb with each
step -from Home Lowell into the Unknown . .
. a serious
lostness that has never replaced itself . . . " (DS,lll}.
In a dream he recorded, Kerouac noted that he had lost his
way and had taken the wrong path during the war.
Similarly,
John Clellon Holmes-referred to the lack of their
gener~
ation's connection to the immediate present as a "broken
circuit." 3
ness:
Holmes speaks specifically of Kerouac's lost-
"I never fully understood the hunger gnavling in him
3
then, and didn't realize the extent to which the breakup of
his Lowell-home, the chaos of the war years and the death
of his father, had left him disrupted, anchorless; a deeply
traditional nature thrown out of kilter, and thus enormously
sensitive to anything uprooted, bereft, helpless or
persevering."
4
Kerouac's geological and psychological displacement as
a youth prompted his later travels on the road.
For all the
virtues of a community (love, a feeling of involvement,
purpose, and meaning) Kerouac had to turn to his friends or
himself.
Hence, he was forced to create his own world in
his mind, a world of child-like innocence.
In Dr. Sax, his
fantasies surrounded his nostalgia for his boyhood in Lowell
and progressed to the mythic struggle between good and evil
in the end of the novel.· Dr. Sax, Jack's friend and protector, explains adult life to him and concludes: "You'll
never be as happy as you are in your quiltish innocent
book-devouring boyhood immortal night" {DS,203).
As a
result, the adult world will never match the innocent,
blissful vision of childhood.
Dr. Sax refers-to evil as only an illusion; he believes
that the snake will turn out to be a husk of seminal gray
doves.
vfuen his potions fail to kill the snake, Sax tells.
Jack that nothing works in the end, that the universe does
not care what happens to man, and that there is nothing
that anyone can do about it.
But at tbat moment, a huge,
4
black bird swoops down and takes the snake away and Jack
concludes that the universe counteracts its own evil
(DS,240-5).
Consequently, Jack is ecstatic and exclaims
that there is still hope.
The hope expressed in Dr. Sax
was one that Kerouac carefully guarded his entire life.
Dr. Sax romanticizes Kerouac's past; the novel is a charming hymn to childhood.
Although Sax's struggle with evil
strips the mystery. away from him, Jack still believes in
the everlasting triumph of good over evil.
Kerouac sought to respond to life freely and
instinctively as a child would and therefore very early
retreated to memories of childhood, the source of man's
hopes and fears.
In On The Road, Sal Paradise says that
the one thing man yearns for "is the sweet remembrance of
some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb
and can only be replaced though we hate to admit it in.
death"
(OTR,l24).
From birth one is alone in the universe;
the child faces the anguish of solitude which terminates in
death.
In order to deal with the solitude of his life,
Kerouac turned to his mother to avoid facing the loneliness
that surrounded him.
He would always return to her for a
home, security, and peace.
As a result, Kerouac could
preserve his innocent vision only by refusing to enter his
father's world.
He identified his father with the wage
earning struggle that left Leo Kerouac unemployed and
spiritually crushed in the thirties.
When his father died,
5
Kerouac felt betrayed and terribly alone.
George Martin in The Town And The City closely
resembles Leo Kerouac.
George suffers the inevitable
disillusionment of the American Dream.
He began life
thinking that the whole world was waiting for him, promising
endless opportunities.
As he reached middle age, he became
aware that the American Dream was only a dream that one
could possess in youth.
The brutal reality of the world
inevitably intrudes after childhood.
·In addition, the
reality of war disrupts the family and a sense of meaninglessness overwhelms each of the sons.
Peter, Francis, Joe,
and George Martin are all deeply disturbed and changed by
the war.
There was always a difference between what they
were expecting and what life was providing for them.
co:mments on this disparity:
Peter
"And yet that children and
fathers should have a notion in their souls that there must
be a way, an authority, a great knowledge, a vision, a view
of life, a proper manner, an order in all the disorder and
sadness of the world--that alone must be God in men • . • "
(TAC,424).
Kerouac believed that the "should be" in men's
souls could prevail.
life:
That is what Kerouac sought all his
a way, a knowledge, a purpose, an order, a meaning
in the universe.
There is a strong emotional intensity in The Town And
The City.
The interaction between the family members,
whether it is brother and brother or father and son,
6
represent the sense of community and familial ties that
Kerouac longed for.
When Peter and Francis return home for
Christmas, they have a conversation that illuminates some
of Peter's (Kerouac's) feelings.
Peter refuses to agree
with Francis about the hopelessness of life.
However,
Francis tells Peter that God is dead, that man is incapable
of expressing love, and that evil will eventually overcome
mankind.
He rejects the effectiveness of action because
good can come of life.
.o
Moreover, he views existence as a
nightmare with the enemy as consciousness.
But Peter prizes the consciousness that allows him to
fully enjoy and appreciate life.
He sees the world as
crazy and comic, but he always has faith that things will
improve.
Accordingly, he feels that life is sweet and that
God will take care of him in the end (TAC,l53-8).
Peter
finally realizes that despite loss, confusion,and grief,
existence holds out love, work, and true hope.
Kerouac's sympathy for anyone "uprooted, bereft, helpless, or persevering" revealed itself in his idealized
treatment of children, Negroes, Mexicans, Indians, hoboes,
and dope addicts-.
He celebrated the simplicity and
spontaneous freedom that he believed these people possessed.
As Sal Paradise says in On The_ Road:
"The best the white
world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough
life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night .
I wished I \vere a Denver J'.1exica.n, or even a poor overworked
7
Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a "white man
disillusioned .. (OTR,l48).
It is an essential life force
that attracts him, a "hepness, .. a vitality, a majesty and
wonder.
Negroes became to Kerouac "the happy, true-hearted,
ecstatic Negroes of America" (OTR,l49), or he saw the-Negro
as "the essential American out there always finding his
solace, his meaning in the felaheen street and not in
abstract morality" (LT,39).
Kerouac's interest lies in the
primitive simplicity of the Negroes.
They can be true-
hearted and ecstatic because they do not participate in the
civilized man's world of competition, greed, and war.
More-
over, the Negro is portrayed as not being concerned with the
white man's self-destructive society; he will live his life
out indulging in simple, pure pleasures.
One of these
pleasures is jazz, that spontaneous burst of creativity and
emotion that comes from the Negro soul.
In Kerouac's idealized novel about Negroes, Pic, Pic's
brother Slim tells the ten-year-old boy about life:
"It's
like the man say in the Bible--A fugitive and a vagabond
shalt thou be in the earth" (P,35).
In that remark, the
Negro embodies the essence of beatness, yet Kerouac's
Negroes meet each new situation with a carefree, happy,
uncomplaining attitude.
In The
Subterranean~_,
when Leo
Percepid has an affair with Mardou Fox, a black girl, he
sees in her a troubled, pure spirit.
Mardou leads a life
l
8
of patient suffering and expects and anticipates nothing;
she merely accepts life.
In her acceptance, Kerouac sees
the essential woman, affectionate and maternal (SUB,l29).
The hobo also becomes sacred to Kerouac because of his
"idealistic lope to freedom and the hills of holy silence
and holy privacy" (LT,l72-3), a freedom to do whatever he
wanted in a world that was being more and more restricted
and confined.
American mechanized civilization threatened
the hobo with extinction; the frontier had vanished, there
was nowhere for him to go.
Shunning wealth and power, the
hobo refuses to enter into the competitive world of adult
America (something that Kerouac also feared) .
The hobo is another symbol of the primitive who is unacceptable to society.
Stripped of any sense of community,
he turns to the joy of the simple life and the brotherly
company of fellow hoboes.
Kerouac concentrates on the
adventure and risk of the hobo's life and omits his
deprivation, humiliation, and hopelessness.
Nevertheless,
to Kerouac, the hobo was always the symbol of absolute
freedom.
The hobo becomes holy and saint-like because of
his overwhelming· commitment to his way of life.
Living in
harmony and at peace with nature, the hobo can relate to
the life forces surrounding him.
Similarly, Kerouac
considered himself a Dharma Bum and a religious wanderer;
he felt a kinship with all other wanderers and homeless bums
of the world.
9
Kerouac was also fascinated with Mexico, a land that
offered another type of unsophisticated freedom.
In
Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac speaks of crossing the border
into Mexico as entering the "Pure Land" (LT,22), and on other
occasions he speaks of it as the Promised Land.
The
primitive surroundings of Mexico appealed to him, allowing
him to feel close to the earth, to the beginning of life and
time.
In On The Road, when Sal and Dean arrive in Mexico,
they think of it as a magic, child-like country waiting for
them at the end of the road.
ecstatic sense of freedom.
Sal immediately feels an
Once away from the stifling
conformity of American civilization, Sal can move, think,
and act as he
chooses~
Kerouac viewed the Mexican people as gay and uncaring.
He discovered a simplicity and exuberance in their lives
that he sought in his own.
In Sabinal, working with the
Negroes and Mexicans in the fields, Sal thinks that he has·
found his life's work {QTR,81}.
Similarly, Tristessa, in
the novel that bears her name, also appealed to Kerouac
because of ·the carefree quality of her life, despite its
squalor and poverty.
He attempts to romanticize her
surroundings and her way of life, but Tristessa remains a
junkie who suffers from pain and despair.
However, Kerouac
convinces himself that Tristessa will be taken care of
because she is innocent; he refers to her as being holy and
assures her that she will go to heaven.
10
Tristessa, Mardou Fox, and Terry from On The Road all
appeal to Kerouac as primitive, sexually attractive women
because they are all outcasts: one is black, one is Mexican,
one is a junkie.
He imagines escaping with each one of
them to a more primitive existence, where the concerns of
the world will not reach him.
Tristessa's room in Mexico
would have removed him from the world but he does not stay
there.
Terry and Sal manage to live in a tent together and
pick cotton, but it doesn't last.
Similarly, Mardou and
Leo plan a trip to Mexico that never occurs and their affair
ends shortly thereafter.
Kerouac saw the outside world as a frightful, lonely
place, yet he rejected female companionship and limited his
close male friends to a handful.
world of the self.
Instead he turned to the
In Visions Of Cody he says:
"My own
life, an endless contemplation, is so interesting, I love
it so, it is vast, goes everywhere"· (VOC,307).
It was
necessary to believe in his·own soul, to love his life, his
dreams, to love himself.
puts it:
As Seymour Krim in
Yo~
And Me
_"The 1'>-...merican society was essentially a launching
pad for the endless development of the Self
We cared
more about trying to enlarge and extend the boundaries of
what we were, of demonically sucking all of the country's
possibilities into ourselves."
5
Krim goes on to say that
his generation's true projects were themselves.
Throughout
Kerouac' s quest for ·the self, he had an overwhelming
11
capacity for hope that enabled him to survive.
In withdrawing from society and active life, Kerouac
sought to examine his soul, hoping for an all...;..transcending
illumination that would purify him and make him joyful and
complete.
When he joins Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder) in The
Dharma Bums, Ray Smith (Kerouac) experiences an intense
feeling of peace, immediately bringing to mind the happy
life of his childhood.
Backpacking in the mountains and
seeking the purity of nature, Ray feels that everything will
be all right forever.
He enjoys an expansive freedom that
he would not be able to.re-experience in other attempts at
self-exile.
In his life and his fiction, the escape from
family and society could only last so long for Kerouac.
Unfortunately, he did not possess the discipline that was
required for being completely self-sufficient.
In 1954 Kerouac began to study Buddhism and he realized
that he wanted to do nothing, only to rest and be kind to
others.
The belief that the world was an illusion beyond
which was nothing but a void comforted him.
Furthermore, he
was interested in the first of the Four Noble Truths in
Buddhism:
All life is suffering.
Using this idea, he
attempted to rationalize the pain, suffering, and loneliness
of his life.
Robert A. Hipkiss provides some insight con-
cerning Kerouac',s belief that the world was a dream or an
illusion:
"There is nothing to do in it (the world) except
exist, to accept the wonder of the illusion, to be kind to
12
all who are afflicted by it, and to know that death marks
the end of it and a return to the perfect void."
6
By
approaching life as an illusion, Kerouac was able to justify
the absurdity and pointlessness of existence to himself.
Whether confronting the world or the void, Kerouac
believed in the ultimate goodness and oneness of existence
and summed up man's purpose on the earth as the need to
experience suffering in preparation to knowing what he
called the Golden Eternity.
He states in Lonesome Traveler:
"For when you realize that God is Everything you know that
you've got to love everything no matter how bad it is"
(LT,l32).
What is required is patience, fortitude, faith,
and the desire to practice kindness and sympathy, as opposed
to America's spiritually corrupting materialism.
Kerouac's
desire for knowledge carried him to Buddhism as one way of
piecing together the problem of existence.
Holmes once said of Kerouac:
"I saw .
John Clellon
. . a man who some-
times seemed positively crazed by the upheavals in his own
psyche, whose life was painfully \vrenched between the desire
to know, for once and all, just who he was, and the equally
powerful desire to become immolated in a Reality beyond
himsel£."
7
Buddhism became for Kerouac a way of "deconditioning,"
of changing his expectations, of opening new horizons.
sanc~ified every moment of existence and placed final
authority in the individual's insights _and actions.
It
13
Believing that all distinctions are falsely imagined,
Buddhism denied all value judgments, declaring that·everything was equally holy.
Because everything was holy,
Kerouac constantly found evidence of divinity and mystery
in everyday existence.
The Dharma
~,
Hiking in the Sierras with Japhy in
Ray exclaims:
"The roar of the silence was
like a wash of diamond waves going through the liquid
porches of our ears, enough to soothe a man a thousand
years" (DB,57).
As Ray is overwhelmed by the magnificence
of nature, his belief in a beneficent God at the heart of
things solidifies.
He is certain that everything will work
out for the best.
Kerouac's quest for simplicity was tied to his generation's common search for freedom.
Since he could not find
the freedom that would lead to spiritual satisfaction within society, he turned to the realm of the self.
Writing in
the fifties, Ralph Ellison commented on the difficulty of
seTf~exploration
within the period:
"The nature of society
is such that we are preven·ted from knowing who we are."
8
In effect, the process of discovering or creating the self
became restricted in the fifties because of a pervading
sense of fear and repression.
The decade was marked by the
Cold War, the intimidation of dissent, and the hysteria of
anti-Communism.
One way to embark on a journey into the
genuine self was to join with those who were forced to live
14
authentic lives.
Such was Norman Mailer's view of the
American Beat hipster, who must prepare himself to "live
with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from
society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the
self."
9
Kerouac - was on a perpetual journey to self discovery,
a search for a spiritual vision.
John Clellon Holmes said:
·"I caught myself looking at Kerouac . -. . wondering where
in God's name that damned vision comes from."
1
°
Kerouac
became alienated from the culture that created him.
The
post war era, in which the Beats were growing up, was
haunted by the continual fear of thermonuclear war.
Technology and bureaucracy became the twin gods of the new
culture.·
The generation of the fifties saw the creation of
blacklists, the purging of unions, and the jailing of
supposed Communists.
In the midst of such mind-controlling
forces, the Beats experienced an almost unbearable sense of
disconnection with a country that was intent on winning the
Cold War and maintaining internal security.
The Beats reacted against society by acting out their
desires, seeking to achieve innocence by purging guilt and
shame.
The Beats needed to believe in something and wanted
to know how to live.
They knew that they would have to come
to terms with life vlithin themselves, without the sanctions
of society.
This led to the excesses of their lives:
mad-
15
ness, drugs, religious ecstasies, dissipation.
"The Beat
thing," as Seymour Krim says, "was an inevitable explosion
of people with raw primary instincts who simply refused to
keep them damned up any longer .
They were people
involved who had respect for their own experiences and
wanted to write from [sic] it."
11
Kerouac and Cassady
proceeded to affirm the life that they had in the only way
they knew how--by acting as if the extreme was the only
real expression of the self.
As Holmes says of Kerouac:
"Such voracious appetites, such psychic vulnerability, such
singleness of·purpose, must ream a man out at the end."
12
That comment describes Kerouac's first conception of the
i.vord "beat" (OTR, 161) •
Later he saw "beat" as meaning "beatific" (OTR,l61),
claiming that the Beats were on a spiritual quest.
Though
they rushed across the country, their journey was inward. ·
Kerouac found a tenderness, humility, joy, and love in his
generation, a vast human spirit that was being destroyed by
the civilizing forces of society.
Holmes declares:
Speaking of "beat,"
"More than mere weariness, it implies the
feeling of having been used, of being raw . • .
A man is
beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his
resources on a single number."
13
Neal Cassady, one of the
prominent figures of the Beat Generation, certainly went
for broke.
Cassady lived the life that Kerouac and Gins-
berg could only write about. ·He acted as an alter ego and
16
a foil to Kerouac; he lived life continuously on the edge._
He was found on February 4, 1968 in Mexico, naked and dead
by the railroad tracks after mixing alcohol with sleeping
pills.
He was forty-one.
Neal and Jack went searching for the innocence and
freedom of a lost frontier.
They were looking for the
moment when all would be revealed, but the insight never
carne.
In Visions Of Cody, Jack speaks of all the Indians
along the road wanting something and says that they wouldn't
be on the road if they had it (VOC,380).
Their search it-
self was a celebration of freedom and life.
As a result,
Deans constant exclamation of "Yes, yes!" (OTR,l63)
affirmed the splendor and joy of experience.
The mark of
Dean's freedom was his infectious laughter, even in despair;
it became a kind of life force.
Yet when Dean and Sal are
on the road, movement sometimes becomes an end in itself,
until they merely travel down an endless road, experiencing
and assimilating nothing.
Moreover, they are both out-
siders, imperfect men in a foreign world who, in fear of
standing still, turn to the road to provide the answers.
In On The Road, Dean races from one end of the
continent to the other, in an attempt to embrace all life.
The furious pace at-which he sets his life finally overtakes
him:
he is pure will, energy, and speed.
Not surprisingly,
the only way that he can rebel against the mediocrity of
life is with an onslaught of manic activity.
When Dean
17
deserts Sal in Mexico while Sal is sick with dysentery,
Dean's girl screams that he never takes life seriously and
that he is just goofing all the time.
This prompts Sal to
see Dean as "the HOLY GOOF" (OTR,l60).
He realizes that
"Dean, by virtue of his enormous series of sins, was
becoming the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the lot"
{OTR,l60).
But in Sal's eyes, his irresponsibility could
be excused because of his innocence and his drive for
ecstasy.
Dean desires but cannot achieve; he yean1sfor beatitude
but ends up a lost and beaten soul.
tessence of Beat.
He remains the quin-
Both Dean and Sal have their own code of
life and they remain faithful to the quest for divine understanding to which they devoted their lives.
Their quest is
vital, even though it is doomed to failure.
At the same
time, their thirst for experience and ecstasy carries them
through life on the road.
As Sal says:
"The only ones for
me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to be
saved, desirous of everything at the same time" {OTR,9).
For both Dean and Sal, the chance world of random experience
on the road is life to ·them and they see the road as being
holy.
As a result, they possess an inspired faith that just
a little further up·the road they will find "IT . . . the
moment when you know all and every-thing is decided forever."
( O'l'R, lOT) . .
Accordingly, Dean and Sal see the country
stretching out in front of them as a vast frontier and wait
for the pearl to be delivered to them, but it never occurs.
Yet they keep on moving and living, hoping to capture it
once and for all.
A parallel search for freedom, with the river substituted for the road, occurs in Huckleberry Finn.
For Huck
and Jim, as well as Dean and Sal, escape from society
presents a way of reaching what society ideally dreams of
for itself.
The river and its analogue, the road, is a
source of beauty and peace of mind which above all provides
the motion that carries the travelers away from a menacing
civilization.
In a busy, competitive world, Huck and Sal
possess the independence of vagabonds.
Huck is forever
lighting out, expressing the irrepressible desire to escape.
Nevertheless, Huck returns once more to responsibility at
the end, only to decide that he will make for the
"territory.n
The river, like the road, is beautiful, powerful, and
full of majesty.
Bernard de Voto describes what it is that
Huck and Jim experience on their river to freedom:
It is
something that "satisfies blind gropings of the mind" -that there is something here which "lies beyond awareness."14
That strange, blurred, mythic quality underlies
Sal and Dean's movement on the road.
As Huck and Jim shove
·their raft once again into the current, they immediately
feel
.....ne freedom and solitude of the river.
l ..
Similarly,
·,.71-,en S;_-tl and Dean start across country _that same feeling of
19
exuberance and awe occurs.
Only on the island and the raft do Huck and Jim have
the chance to practice the idea of brotherhood.
Huck
explains that on the raft everyone should feel comfortable,
content, and kind toward each other.
This same humanity is
expressed in the car when Sal travels with his other manic
friends, trying to rid himself of the stifling authority of
society.
The vernacular sensibility of Huck and Jim is
pitted against the genteel sensibility of the dominant
culture.
Their commitment to freedom and spontaneity
corresponds to Kerouac's innocent vision of life.
Sal
perceives a wonder-filled world in nature and on the road;
that marvelous innocence stands in direct contrast to the
decadent and destructive society that surrounds him.
Sal
is the inheritor of Huck's passion for freedom.
Kerouac profoundly experienced the nostalgia for the
freedom of the frontier and a:regret for the loss of
simplicity and spiritual inspiration.
He groped for faith
out of intellectual despair; anything was better than what·
he saw as the valueless abyss of modern life.
Boredom and
desperation drove him to seemingly purposeless flights on
the road.
Sal, however, remains optimistic about his life:
"No one can tell us that there is no God .
fin~,
God Exists, we know time
. . Everything is
. Furthermore we know
·America, we're at horne . . . We give and take and go in the
incredibly complicated sweetness" (OTR,218).
It was this
20
kind of unflagging hope that perpetuated Kerouac's
idealism.
The final source for Dean and Sal's frenzied activities
on the road must in retrospect be traced back to the social
and cultural phenomenon of their generation.
The Beats saw
humanity after the Second World War as psychically living
in the ruins of a civilization.
From this point of view,
the ones who survived had the least to lose because they
were already psychically crushed:
the Beat hipster.
the Negro, the addict,
Their egos had been sufficiently
destroyed, forcing them to reject the demands of community
and society.
The outcast cannot fall back on society but
instead must turn all his attention to the sheer freedom of
the moment.
"To swing" is to throw one's entire being into
the moment and accept whatever happens, to accept the Now.
Dean in his raving way must have twice as many experiences·
as a normal, rational being.
As soon as he digs Sal to the
I
limit, he races out and raps with Carlo Marx.
As soon as he
settles down with bis first wife, Marylou, he must devise a
way to live with his other wife, Camille.
At the same time,
Denver has to be substituted for San Francisco as the hip
center of the universe and then the West Coast takes
precedence over the East.
One
the road.
~hing
enables Dean to lead this crazed double life:
Within the confines of the car, in the dark of .
night or daytime, surrounded by mountains, forests, streams,
21
endless stretches of highway, suburbia and city, intersections, redbrick alleys or neon-filled streets, the guilt
and torment of conformity and society seem to vanish.
Life
itself replaces the awful, wracking doubts about existence.
In this way Dean began to see the holiness of life, fully
lived in the moment.
For Sal, the road offers an opportunity to comprehend
the meaning of himself and the universe.
The literal
journey through the cities and towns of America is in
reality a symbolic journey of exploration through the depths
of Sal's soul.
Moreover, the familiar world that Sal
inhabits bores him, spurring him on to leave the known and
habitual life in order to explore the unknown and mystic.
Like Adam, who possessed the knowledge of love and God,
Kerouac desired to experience the mysterious and the forbidden.
Adam failed and man was doomed to. search endlessly
for what he could not find.
Whether for purposes of
achievement or flight, Kerouac undertook his voyages to
reconcile life with his dream of life.
So in a sense,
Kerouac re-enacts the myth of a wandering Adam.
The underlying reasons for Sal's quest in On The Road
may be illuminated by looking at Walt Whitman's "Song of the
Open Road," a poem that relates Whitman's voyage down a road
that leads to the world, to others, and to the threshold of
self-discovery.
One of the first lessons that the road
teaches is to be receptive:
to accept everything and every-
(
22
one.
No person or aspect of life should be rejected.
Furthermore, Whitman realized that there was something
unseen and undefinable about his experiences on the road to
self-realization.
He discovered, as Kerouac did, that the
meaning of life and the search for one's identity required
living fully and intensely in the moment.
In addition, the
self must be open to the world and to others.
The goal of
Whitman and Kerouac is finally inseparable from the journey
itself.
Self-discovery is a process, :a life time under-
taking; the possible moments of enlightenment or satori
cannot sustain one thro11ghout one's entire life.
The
journey must be continuous.
Two of Kerouac's contemporaries did not share his
optimistic vision, refusing to believe that the journey down
the road led.to
paradise~
Louis Simpson, in his book of
poetry At The End Of The Open Road, attempts to deal with
the pathetic and tragic failure of the American Dream and
myth.
He feels that the American Dream is a disease and
that the promises that seemed inherent in America were
never realized.
Moreover, America itself is a journey, as
Simpson attests in the title of his collection of poems.
In "Walt lmitman on Bear Mountain,
11
Simpson queries:
"vlhere are you, Walt/The Open Road goes to the used-car
lot."
15
The dream is doomed to failure.
journey ends at the Pacific Ocean.
The American
In "Lines Written Near
San Francisco," Alcatraz faces San FraDcisco Bay.
The
23
speaker believesthat at the end of the open road awaits a
prison, signifying that the restless American spirit to move
must eventually end.
simi~ar
John Barth exhibits a
road.
unyielding view of the
Jacob.Horner in The End Of The Road possesses no
values that he can believe in wholeheartedly, making.action
difficult for him.
Moreover, he cannot choose a moral code,
having no firm opinions.
John Barth, speaking of Jake's
role in the novel, says that he allows Jake to "carry a·ll
. 16
non-myst.ical Value - thinking tO the end Of the road 1 If
..
.
-~:--:··. ~'-
creating a very bleak picture of humanity.
Barth's concept
of goals and the character of man are so ambiguous that a
dream of progress or freedom is not only irrelevant but
meaningless.
Before and after his trips on the road, Kerouac always
required solitude and isolation to examine himself and his
experiences.
Three novels that illustrate this self-imposed
exile are Desolation Angels, The Dharma Bums, and Big Sur.
At Big Sur and Desolation Peak, Jack Duluo·z 's complacency
and self-sufficiency turn into alienation and despair as
he suffers from loneliness.
Preferring to withdraw from
the complexities of life, he seeks the solitude of nature,
only to be unable to escape the torment of his own soul.
He tries to absorb the world into himself by perceiving it
in terms of his own sensibilities, but he eventqally falls
into deep despair facing a reality that he can no longer
24
comprehend.
While \valking in the mountains with Japhy Ryder in
The Dharma Bums, Ray is fascinated by the things he sees
and remains in a contemplative mood.
He is aware of where
he is and is able to relate to his surroundings.
But at
Big Sur and Desolation Peak, Jack experiences a powerful
sense of dislocation and disconnection.
At Desolation
Peak, feelings of personal insignificance overwhelm Jack as
he compares himself to the vast mountains surrounding him
like Mount Hozomeen.
His thoughts would instantly turn to
the mystery of nature, death, and the void.
The mountain
he called Mien Mo near Big Sur struck him as an image right
out of a horrible nightmare he had had.
Out of this
increasing paranoia, all nature around .the cabin becomes
frightful and evil in his· state of mind.
Kerouac's restless search for freedom would drive him
on, causing him to shuttle back and forth_between solitude
qnd the mass _hysteria of his friends on the road.
With
Neal Cassady, Kerouac found that his sheer joy for life
could be expressed through the experience of jazz.
centers itself around ·the moment.
Jazz
Accordingly, the jazz
group creates the shape of the spontaneous piece,
individuals improvise and both the jazzman and the hipster
obtain release in the moment through the fusion of
creativity and exuberance.
Dean and Sal revel in the
feeling without words that jazz speaks.to them ..
Mention-
25
ing a jazz soloist, Sal says:
"He had to blow across
bridges and come back and do it with such infinite soulexploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows
it's not the tune that counts but IT"
(OTR,l70).
IT is the
knowing of the heart, the knowing of the emotions, devoid
of words.
The music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and
Lester Young also influenced Kerouac, allowing him to
remove all inhibitions and just go with his feelings in his
writings.
As a result, he incorporated the spontaneity
that was involved in jazz into his conception of spontaneous
prose, a process that was a celebration of the creative act.
Furthermore, i t was an attempt to express the intensity of
the moment and capture the rush of sensations in prose.
Kerouac was very aware of the sound of prose and '"'rote prose
paragraphs in his own American speech rhythms.
He had the
capacity to hear his own vJTi ting; he would listen to his
sentences as if they were musical or rhythmical
constructions.
Formulating a general principle of writing
prose, Kerouac states:
"The rhythm of how you decide to
'rush' yr statement determines the rhythm of the poem,
whether it is a poem in verse-separated lines, or an endless
one-line poem called prose."
17
Seeking a way to communicate his frustrations with the
world, he sacrificed form for the momentary breakt.hroughs of
feeling and awareness that came through his language.
His
26
prose takes on a movement and anxiety all its own as it
sweeps the reader along in a haze of sensations.
Kerouac
stated that the writer's function should be to "sketch the
flow that already exists intact in mind."
18
This method of
sketching began when he was writing On The Road.
Inspired
by the sincerity and emotional intensity that he found in
Neal Cassady's letters, he proclaimed that prose should be
an undisturbed flow from the mind.
Since emotions and
feelings were revered, he felt that the writer must not
change or revise any of his initial impulses.
The romantic
belief that truth lies in basic human emotions makes.·
spontaneity a value.
In light of such a belief, the images
of his mind took on a certain truth of their own, the truth
of emotion.
The confessional nature of spontaneous prose
fit right in with Kerouac's goals of understanding and
communicating with others.
Since his novels reflected a
world that he did not under$tand rationally, his concept of
spontaneous prose had various results.
--In On The Road and Visions Of Cody, random recollections and experiences dissolve the structure of the
books.
One association or fragment of memory triggers the
next series of unrelated thoughts.
Dreams, actual scenes,
sights, sounds, and images all merge with one another,
causing the central focus to become lost in a mass of
perceptions.
_f:)ig_
~~£_,
In The Su!?terraneans, The Dharma Bums, and
his extreme emotional need to reveal his
27
experiences comes across.
The intensity of his-emotions is
communicated through the rushing power of images, feelings,
and ideas, imbuing the ordinary and commonplace with a raw
and impulsive beauty.
But when the focus is lost, the
words pile upon one another in an onslaught of uninspired,
meaningless repetitions&
Kerouac believed that innocence was the highest virtue.
In his novels, his treatment of primitive peoples disclosed
his own longing for a pure and simple existence.
Since
innocence was desired, Kerouac sought the absolute freedom
of the road.· The road offered a journey to self-realization
and it was the only place where he could feel totally and
ecstatically alive.
When Sal and Dean embark on their
mythic quest, they supply their own reasons to live:
live for the moment.
to
Kerouac's love for simplicity and
freedom is closely linked to his idealism.
Kerouac -, s childlike awe of America enabled him to
imagine it as a oromised land, another Eden.
The Idea of
A.merica was so overwhelming to Kerouac, a French Canadian
and outsider, that he was drawn into believing in America
as sheer promise, future and hope.
Although reality never
coincided with his expectations, he continued to believe in
his dream.
The freedom of a lost frontier drew Kerouic
across the country with a force he was powerless to resist.
It
'{>.ra_s
thf.::
same force tha.t in the nineteenth century
28
conquered the frontier.
According to Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier
served as a safety valve for dissatisfied people who were
restricted by past or present misfortunes.
The seemingly
endless free land to the West provided a second chance for
these people.
19
The fact that free land has always existed
on the West Coast instilled in the average American a dream
of freedom and new opportunities.
Moreover, the idea of a
wilderness or frontier where man could exert his individuality, tame nature, and make a place for himself remained
the dream of many Americans, including Kerouac, a half·century later.
The new kind of man who came out of the American West
was a self-confident, energetic individualist.
shared the pioneer and backwoodsman spirit:
quest into the unknown.
land of
opport~t.mi ty,
Kerouac
an urge to
To immigrants, America was the
vast wealth, and strength; it gave
them a chance to better themselves.
Yet by 1890 the
frontier was gone; the supply of free land had been
exhausted.
With the arrival of industrialization, a demand
for social cooperation displaced the rugged individualism
of the past.
In the 1940's and SO's Kerouac was still
searching for the frontier and still possessed the hope
that he would find it.
But as much as Kerouac dreamed of what should be, he
always met the harsh, everyday reality of the outside world,
29
which plunged him into despair.
His father had instilled
a dream vision of America in him and Kerouac always hoped
that America would live up to the dream.
His idealism
formed an integral part of his innocent vision.
Further-
more, his optimism was part of another American tradition
identified with the beliefs of Emerson, Thoreau, and ·
Whitman.
Kerouac believed implicitly in the American Dream.
him it meant man's potential greatness.
To
He possessed an
ever present faith in man's ability to transcend
limitations.
Against the conformity of his age, he felt
that each individual must discover and live by his own
truths.
Thoreau similarly chose not to indulge in the
trivialities of the nineteenth century and patiently
attended to his own self-cultivation.
Both Emerson and
Thoreau shared an overwhelming faith in man's capabilities.
Kerouac follows this tradition and approaches life with the
same faith.
At Big Sur, he reverts to being Ti Jean, the
child, the last holy fool in the world who enjoys the simple
pleasures _of life.
Jack refers to both Whitman and Emerson,
telling himself that he should practice self reliance.
He
feels that he should be able to enjoy "The infancy of the
simplicity of just being happy in the woods, conforming to
..
nobody's idea about what todo"
(!38,30).
Thoreau's stay at Walden Pond foreshadows Kerouac's
frequent withdrawals to the mountains and nature.
Both
30
Thoreau and Kerouac sought to escape the debilitating
effects of the industrial revolution; they both wanted a
simpler way of life, one of contemplation and insight where
they could seek the Divine through nature.
Emerson and
Thoreau felt that one should establish a harmonious
relationship with nature which offered a contentment and
tranquility not found in human society.
In Walden Thoreau
demonstrates that it is possible to realize one's potential
for ideal existence in the world.
At the same time, Kerouac always dreamt of what he
could ideally be; he saw himself as a great writer like
Proust or Joyce and also the hero of his own novels.
By
believing that an ideal mode of life was within his grasp,
he followed his dreams and attempted to live the life that
he had imagined.
Similarly, Thoreau preached confide.nce
and joy, marveling at the richness and fullness of life.
His belief in simplifying life corresponded to Kerouac's
reverence for the simple existence that allows one to turn
inward toward one's inner reality.
In a condition of
simplicity, one can immerse oneself in life and enjoy
immediate experience.
Kerouac did not experience the ecstatic integration
wit.h nature that Thoreau achieved.
The inspiration and
understanding that Thoreau derived continually eluded him.
Kerouac's retreats to nature might have provided some
transcendent experience but he could not allow himself to
31.
get in touch with his surroundings, to become receptive to
natural beauty and knowledge.
At Big Sur, Kerouac confronts
a frightening, oppressive nature, where everything appears
to portend
dea~h.
As he approaches his cabin, he looks
down the thousand foot drop seeing an overturned chassis of
a car.
Even in a supposed wilderness, civilization has
managed to infiltrate the solitude.
Nature, which should
soothe him, seems to turn against him.
At one point, the
wind begins to blow so fiercely that it drowns out the
reassuring sounds of a creek.
Night after night, Jack sits
near the ocean recording its sounds for his poem "Sea."
But as days fade into one another, he senses that the ocean
doesn't want him there.
By this time, Jack is completely cut off from nature,
divided and despairing within himself.
With a seemingly
meaningless future before him and faced with a threatening
natural world, he feels absolutely alone.
At the end of
the novel, Jack, Dave Wain and two girls return to the
cabin.
One of the girls, Billie, has fallen in love with
Jack and thinks that Jack feels the same way about her.
Jack sees the ocean as treacherous and thinks that it will
kill Billie if he doesn't run down to save her.
At the
same time, he would drown himself if he had the courage.
Even when he goes to the creek for water while undergoing
delirium tremens, in his paranoia the water tastes like
gasoline.
Final~y,
the river tells him to die because
32
everything is all over.
For the first few days at Big Sur, he vows that he will
quietly watch the world and attempt a Thoreau-like communion
with nature, using neither booze nor drugs.
fourth day he is bored.
Big Sur seems final.
Yet by the
Everything about the six weeks at
After leaving Big Sur and arriving at
Monsanto's bookshop, he is told that his cat Tyke, who
always reminded him of his dead brother, Gerard, has died.
When he returns to the cabin with Dave Wain and the two
girls,· the final horror begins.
Jack is afflicted with
delirium tremens and feels that he is going mad.
But on the last night at the cabin, in the midst of
hundreds of devils, vultures, and bats, he has. a vision of
the cross.
As a result, blessed relief finally comes;
goodness suffuses his body and mind.
By the end of the
novel, the torture and misery of his days has become a
memory.
He vows to straighten out his affairs; he will go
home to his mother, ieaving San Francisco behind.
Believing
that the Golden Eternity will bless all things, he says:
"Something good will come out of all things yet--And it will
be golden and eternal just like that" (BS,216).
In his
mind, nothing ever happened; his faith miraculously has
carried him through.
By going through pain and torture,
Jack exemplifies the epitome of beatness, yet he is able to
overciome the horrifying experience through his faith in the
Golden Eternity.
33
Kerouac also shared Whitman's love for mankind.
To
Whitman, to be a free man, to live from within, to dominate
one's own destiny was a heroic undertaking.
man was a singer of the self, a man of
vision.
Whitman's ideal
imaginat~~n
He constantly emphasized the self:
and
the ideas,
experiences, spiritual insights, and psychological states.
Similarly, Kerouac discovered that the experiences that he
and his friends were having could be the subject of
literature; his experiences mattered and had meaning.
Like
Whitman, he celebrates his own self, his individuality, and
his personality, which prompted him to write a group of
books that he referred to as the Duluoz Legend, the
chronicle of his life.
states:
In the preface to Big Sur, he
"The whole thing forms one enormous comedy, seen
through the eyes of poor Ti Jean (me) , otherwise known as
Jack Duluoz."
Consequentiy, his work is highly auto-
biographical and his novels are all·tied together by the
presence of the "I", the fictive Kerouac in various
di~guises.
Kerouac produced a lifetime of writing about
what he had seen with his own eyes and used a vernacular
expressive prose that approximated his vision.
Like \vhi tman, Kerouac saw divinity in the ordinary
life of man.
Whitman as poet became part of everyonearound
him; he saw all and condemned nothing.
"Song of Myself"
presents the poet's journey through life and the spiritual
knowledge he seeks along the way.
Believing that it is
34
possible to achieve communion with God through love and
contemplation, Whitman bears a message of faith for all
Americans.
Kerouac's statement that "It always makes me
proud to love the world somehow--Hate's so easy compared"
(BS,l41) provides a perfect counterpart to Whitman's faith.
Furthermore, a belief that the human spirit would prevail
against all obstacles was held by Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson,
and Kerouac alike.
The major theme of Kerouac's novels is the confrontation of innocence and experience.
Stifled by his
community, terrified by society, Jack Duluoz rebels against
his world.
His subsequent experiences on the fringes of
society (drugs, mystic visions, sexual experiences) render
him unable to fully return to the world he left behind.
Broken, he can never be completely restored, so he harbors
a permanent need to escape.
In reaction, Kerouac raises a
defensive shield and relies on an innocent vision of the
world that betrayed him.
Kerouac was troubled by the lack of caritas (sympathy
and kindness) in the contemporary world:
"All the pretti-
ness of tapestries, lands, people--worthless if there is no
sympathy--Poets of genuis are just decorations on the wall
v-lithout the poetry of kindness and Caritas" (LT,88).
he felt that one should accept all people.
Hence,
His early
relationship with his brother Gerard affected him greatly,
causing him ·to attempt. to susi:a in this -loving attitude into
35
the adult world.
His brother's death at the age of nine
crushed Kerouac; he turned his ideal love for Gerard toward
Neal Cassady, whom he always thought of as his dead brother
reincarnated.
Kerouac thought of Neal Cassady as the great American
hero of his fiction.
He saw Neal as another lost soul,
hoping and dreaming in spite of his plight.
Neal's dream
of happiness was achieved through sex, love, and spontaneous
action.
In Dean Moriarty, modeled on·Neal Cassady in On The
Road, Kerouac created the hero of the Beat Generation.
(Cody) is the embodiment of innocence.
Dean
R.W.B. Lewis' figure
of heroic innocence, the American Adam closely resembles
Dean.
As Lewis sees
it~
the new hero of nineteenth century
2
fiction was connected with Adam before the Fall.
Kerouac
°
incorporates an Adam-like innocence into the heroes of his
novels; they continually revert to the past or seek a lost
Eden.
Sal and Dean search for heroic experience.
Dean
acts as a reckless catalyst for enthusiasm and turmoil.
Having never had a stable job, family, or community, he
rejects conformi·ty and exults in his individuality and
eccentricity.
Dean searches for the final act that will reveal his
true heroism.
Acting with abandon, he is open to any new
idea and can accept anything on faith.
But he fails to
make-distinctions; like a child, he does not analyze or
eva J:uate
the world he encounters.
He $imply experiences it.
36
Accordingly, his delight in the energy and fullness of life
is expressed 1n innocent wonder.
He does not admit the
seriousness and consequences of his actions.
Neither Dean
nor Sal confront their problems but escape throughconsuming
action, drugs, or dreams.
In remaining faithful to the
vision that will transcend their sorrow-filled lives,·they
meet only more sorrow.
Kerouac valued the innocence of children, feeling that
they were able to perceive the world in the proper way, to
experience a joyous delight in life.
To escape from the
destructive impulses of society, Kerouac turned to the road.
The road that beckoned to Kerouac demanded that he break
out of himself and encounter, and at the same time,
transcend the world.
Kerouac questioned his existence and
rejected the limitations and conditions imposed by the life
that he was born in to by setting out on the open road.
In
his novels, Kerouac shared a journey and a vision with the
reader, a vision of innocence made up of his love of
simplicity, his quest for freedom, and his idealism.
Kerouac's reverence for spontaneity and its attendant
emotions led him to develop his method of spontaneous prose,
a working example of the exuberance of the creative act.
He
devoted his life to writing and to his quest to fully.understand the self.
In place of chaos, death, torment, doubt,
and disbelief, Kerouac, in his best writing, substituted an
extraordinary sense of the self and a vision of experience
37
as encompassing all
m~aning.
Furthermore, he transcended
the tragedy of his life through the innocent hope of his
novels.
The restless energy of his prose exhibited the
power of the simple virtues he believed in.
Fantasies,
visions, and dreams made up his life, a life devoted to
joining the past and future in the present and living
moment.
38
FOOTNOTES
1
Robert A. Hipkiss, Jack Kerouac: Prophet Of The New
Romanticism (Lawrence, Kansas: The Regents Press of Kansas,
1976)' p. 2.
2
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New York: New ·
American Library, 1959r;-p. 191. All subsequent references
to Kerouac•s novels will apply to the specific editions
listed in the Bibliography and will be cited in the text as
follows:
OTR for On The Road, DA for Desolation Angels,
DS for Dr. Sax, LS for Lonesome Traveler, P for Pic,
DB for The Dharma-Bums, SUB for The Subterraneans;-TAC for
The Town And The City, VOC for viSions Of Cody.
,__
3
John Tytell, Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature
of the Beat Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.,
1976);
p.g.
4
John Clellon Holmes, Nothing More To Declare
(New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1967)-,-p. 77.
5
seymour Krim, You And Me (New York:
and Winston, 1974), p. --nl-.-
Holt, Rinehart,
6 Hlp
. k'lSS, p. 66 •
7
Holmes, p. 85.
8 Tony Tanner, Cl' ty Of Wor d s
(Lon d on:
The Trinity
Press, 1971), p. 432.
9 Norman Mailer, The White Negro (San Francisco:
Liqhts Books, 1957), p . - r
10 .
Holmes, p. 84.
Jl
.
· Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (New York:
::::cribner 's Sons, 197I""f; p:-52.
12
City
Charles
Holmes, p. 84.
1
-3rb.
u l . , p .10
l.
14p\
.] .
y oung, Ernes t
-~l .lp
(Fr~w York:
.
Hem1ngway:
A Recons1. d era t.10n
Harcourt, Brace-; &vJorld, Inc-:-, 1952), p. 218.
39
15 LOUlS
. s.lmpson, At The End Of The Open Road
(Middletmvn, Connecticut: Wesleyanuniversity Press,
1960), p. 64.
16 navid Morrell, John Barth: An Introduction
(University Park, Pennsylvania-:-ThePennsylv.ania State
University Press, 1976), p. 16.
17 nonald M. Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry:
1945-1960 (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1960), p. 414.
18 Thomas Parkinson (ed.), A Casebook On The Beat
(New York: Thomas Y.Crowell Co.~ 1961), p.~8-.-19Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier In American
History (New York: Holt, Rinehart;-and Winston-,-1920),
PP. 9-13.
20
R. w. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago,
Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 5-8.
40
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Allen, Donald M. (ed.). The New American Poetry 1945-1960.
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·
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Press, 1973.
The Uncertain Self: Whitman's Drama
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Charters, Ann. Kerouac.
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Cook, Bruce.
New York: Doubleday &
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The Beat Generation.
Scribner~Sons, 1971.
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Hipkiss, Robert A. Jack Kerouac: Prophet Qf The New
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Holmes, John Clellon. Nothing More To Declare.
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1961.
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San Francisco: City Lights
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The Dharma Burns.
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Visions Of Gerard.
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